Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
A dark velvet, blue-spotted mourning cloak butterfly flits across our path. I chased these as a child at my grandparents’ farm in Windsor, Colorado. Childhood memories are powerful. When I decided to move from Tennessee to Utah, the Dean of Vanderbilt’s School of Arts and Sciences asked if Brigham Young University was offering me more money. “No,” I said. “I miss the scent of sage.” Visceral childhood memory trumped academic prestige. And, of course, there’s the matter of public lands. Tennessee, though exquisitely beautiful, is almost entirely privately owned. The federal government controls sixty-four percent of Utah, and ten-percent of the landscape is state controlled. That means it belongs to us and not to someone with money to build a big fence.
Another insect flashes past, a brilliant scarlet-orange patch under its wings. “Boxelder bug,” Sam says. “‘Boisea trivittata.’ Named by Thomas Say, an American entomologist who was part of an expedition to the Rocky Mountains in 1819 and 1820. He was the first to classify and name the coyote and the lazuli bunting as well. The bright red of this bug, like the red of many species, warns predators that there’s a foul smell and/or taste waiting for them if they attack.”
Up the trail, a tank-like ladybug (Hippodamia convergens) splits its red-orange shell (more foul odor!) to reveal black wings. Small spiders dodge our tires. When I think I have found the first tender green leaf on the still barren oak brush, it turns out to be a lime-green stinkbug (Acrosternum hilare). Another stinker.
At the top of the hill, Sam points to a tiny plant with red leaves. “Some plants use this red coloring to protect themselves from the bright sunlight that bleaches their chlorophyll. The pigment is in a class known as anthocyanins, the same pigments that, along with tannin, may make red wine good for the heart and cause the red coloring in fall leaves.”
“Thanks for the lecture,” I tell Sam. “But help me with something else. Last night I looked up death camus in both of my field guides to wildflowers. The one lists only meadow death camus, Zigadenus venenosus, and doesn’t mention any other variants. The other book describes mountain death camus, Zigadenus elegans, and notes the existence and characteristics of Zigadenus gramineus, Zigadenus venenosus, and Zigadenus paniculatus. What’s the deal?”
“You’ve stumbled onto something controversial and interesting here,” Sam says. “It’s a classic disagreement between the lumpers (me included) and the splitters. Your second guide was written by splitters and your first by lumpers. Lumpers see splitters as scientists who proliferate species endlessly on the basis of insubstantial differences. Splitters see lumpers as scientists who are too lazy or conservative to pay attention to the importance of detail. Actually, the trick is in understanding what details matter in separating taxa. Dandelions, for example, are a great source of tension between splitters and lumpers. They grow from Alaska to Patagonia and most lumpers call all or most of them Taraxacum officinale. Because dandelions are self-fertilizing, mutations tend to “stick,” and splitters distinguish hundreds of species. Check your guides and see what you find.”
At home, I open Carl Schreier’s A Field Guide to Wildflowers of the Rocky Mountains. The common dandelion, Taraxacum officinale, is listed as a single species. Craighead, Craighead, and Davis’s Rocky Mountain Wildflowers, however, lists three dandelions that occur in the Rockies, and states that “close to 1000 species of Taraxacum have been described, but conservative botanists now recognize around 50.” Schreier is a lumper, Craighead and friends splitters. It’s that simple—once Sam points it out. I bought these guides expecting scientific facts. Instead, I get judgments, assessments, interpretations built on biases. “Truth,” Nietzsche wrote, “is a mobile army of metaphors.” I’m fifty years old and have known this for decades. Now I know it again.
I try to explain this epistemological rediscovery to Sam and he has a sage reply: “Truth is relative for folks comfortable with dissent and argument, but solid as concrete among ideologues.”
21 March, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
A storm during the night has scoured the air! The sun burns with a rare clarity, north of the equator for the first time since the fall equinox. We leave civilization and climb the mountainside. Restraints slough from minds and bodies. We ride over the quartzite, past Johnson’s Hole, along the limestone ridge, not stopping to catch our breath till the trail meets the fire road. We look again at the umbel.
“I did some reading,” Sam says. “I think this is Cymopterus longipes (spring parsley)—because of the bluish green coloration of the leaves. If I’m right, in the next couple of weeks the floral stalk will raise off the soil several centimeters on a stemlike structure known as a pseudoscape.
Near the spring parsley stands another tiny white flower. “They’re fourmerous,” Sam indicates. “And see how each of the four petals is split in two? I’d guess them to be mustards, the Brassicaceae family, genus Draba.”
We are down on our knees, our faces inches from the ground, our asses pointed skyward. I take my reading glasses, sans earpieces, from my shorts pocket and hold them to my nose. The tiny flowers are delicate and beautiful. Like us.
“By the way,” Sam says, “I checked on the death camus we thought had been cropped. Came up with a couple of different stories. First, some people believe deer will not browse death camus. Second, some suggest deer browse on Zigadenus when it is young and tender and there isn’t much else to eat. They may be able to get by with this as long as they eat other forage as well. Valerius Geist—who studied with Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz and has become a wonderful biologist with a focus on large North American mammals—argues that the mule deer’s rumen and bacterial flora can detoxify plant poisons, helped by its large liver and kidneys. He also points out that overgrazing has reduced the abundance of many good forage plants, making way for death camus and other toxic species.”
We’ve ridden the lower section of the Great Western Trail a dozen times since it dried. Today we’ll try a higher stretch, a challenging single-track trail winding up the flank of Mt. Timpanogos toward two pyramidal humps that protrude from the mountain’s southwest slope: Little and Big Baldy. Bikers at Mad Dog Cycles call this semi-hidden trail “Frank”—a nonsense code name—hoping to keep down the number of riders.
Frank begins with an abrupt approach through overhanging oak brush, jerks up a steep, tight C-turn, thrusts up two linked chutes so rocky we call them creek beds (with shifting adjectives to suit how badly they’re beating us up), and follows a relentlessly climbing ridge for miles. It doesn’t really need a code name to keep riders away.
I can’t find a line through the loose rocks just above the C-turn, and in the second creek bed Sam loses his balance as well. We remount and pedal up the ridge as slowly as the requirements of balance allow. In a meadow where the trail flattens just a bit, we stop for a moment (this has nothing to do with how my lungs are burning) to watch six heavy-bodied, spindly-legged elk (Cervus canadensis) slip out of the meadow and over a ridge. Creatures rightly wary of our presence. Specters of beauty and grace. Can they admire our forms? Find humor in our two-wheeled contraptions?
Not far below where we ran into the toe of a late avalanche last spring, wet snow halts our progress. Clusters of pink and white flowers bobble on their stems at the snow’s edge. The blossoms are fivemerous and have
